


incapable of her own distress

by anotherbuskitten



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, List Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 11:17:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18119735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherbuskitten/pseuds/anotherbuskitten
Summary: Remus says, the one time she sees him during the parley, that she looks ill. Which she thinks is a bit rude coming from someone who has so wholeheartedly embraced being whatever you would call an inferius if it was still a living man.





	incapable of her own distress

1\. She is born in 1957, she is smiling and silent like she knows what happened to her brothers and sisters when they cried.

  
2\. Her mother hands are slick with blood when she holds her, her lipstick feels like damnation.

  
3\. Her father is leading the damned to salvation.

  
4\. She often thinks of Hogwarts as another cult.

  
5\. And graduating meant that she had failed again.

  
6\. She does anyway, with nine N.E.W.T.s

  
7\. Her mother dies when she is eight, sputtering out as the fifteenth child comes into the world

  
8\. Her younger brother cries and cries and she screams when her father –

  
9\. When her father –

  
10\. When –

  
11\. When she is eleven a letter arrives for her and the women who still live in the field call her holy.

  
12\. They call her sainted when she comes home.

  
13\. She calls herself damnation.

  
14\. Sirius, when they are partners in a war because nobody wanted to be partnered with Hamlet or Ophelia, which is what Sirius’s friend Remus calls them, Sirius calls her Grail and says it is because she will burn the ones who are not meant to drink her.

  
15\. She can never quite decide if she likes him or not.

  
16\. When she is nineteen she joins the auror corps and finds the grave that has her older brother’s body in it. She kisses his tiny, tiny skull and threads his rib-bones into a bracelet.

  
17\. When Sirius is arrested she starts hanging out in churches and reading poetry in the confession boxes.

  
18\. She confesses some times. She says “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I took the one that was easiest and now I am lost and I think I killed my father after he killed my brother but my best friend is in prison and I can’t visit him and –

  
19\. She hums This Ole House because it was on the last three muggle radio stations she listened to.

  
20\. She finally gets round to watching Hamlet when she is thirty and she wonders if she was meant to have screamed like her brothers and drowned in her father’s hate like all those women in the fields.

  
21\. She dies quietly when is almost forty, tears on her cheeks like prayers and she thinks –

  
22\. My Father’s name was Thomas too.

**Author's Note:**

> This is in the same 'verse as my previous Sirius and Emmeline fic, which is a 'verse that exists in my head and has no plans of ever being a proper story which means I can gladly not write it down.


End file.
